Paid Search Advertising Plays Its Part in Industrial B2B: Blog 3 of 4

Kaitlyn Kraus

Your agency’s content marketing is on point, email and nurture campaigns are going great and you’ve been taking steps to optimize your website for organic search. So, what’s next to help you drive demand for your products? Paid search advertising could be an option, depending on your goals.

Paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC), is just one of myriad online advertising options, and creating ad campaigns that meet your marketing goals can be tricky. Success is contingent upon numerous factors, from the level of competition to keyword selections to the type of product you are marketing. Even well-constructed campaigns don’t always earn reasonable click-through rates or meaningful conversions. In fact, marketers are generally hard-pressed to achieve better than a three percent click-through rate (CTR) according to Word Stream. Done poorly, without the right research and strategy, paid search simply won’t pay for itself.

Our paper, An Industrial Marketer's Guide to Digital Advertising, discusses some of the pros and cons of paid search advertising as well as other digital advertising options, including traditional display, display network and social media. You can download it here.

Paid Search Advertising Defined

Paid search encompasses the PPC category where ads appear near the top of search engine result pages, using platforms like Google AdWords. Each time the sponsored result is clicked, the advertising company pays. Paid search advertisements generally look the same as other results data, but are tagged with some sort of distinguishing label.

Statistics on Paid Search

As daunting as paid search can be, there is some good news; AdWords on average is pretty affordable for B2B marketers. For B2B the average cost per click is $3.33, which is lower than other benchmarks for industries such as the legal profession and consumer-based companies (Word Stream). Businesses that start an AdWords campaign generally see a $2.00 return for every dollar spent (Google). Visitors acquired through paid search are also 50 percent more likely to make a purchase (Unbounce). But getting visitors to click on a paid ad is difficult.

Can Paid Search Work?

PPC is not a replacement for organic search engine optimization because engagement and lead generation results from organic search yield are better than PPC. Our paper covers some of these statistical differences in more detail. Users can be annoyed by sponsored search results, and more commonly click on organic links. Therefore, most marketers view paid search as a complementary tactic.

For more details on the pros and cons of paid search advertising or to learn about other online advertising options, download TriComB2B’s paper, An Industrial Marketer’s Guide to Digital Advertising,here.